The Strangeness of Grief | Hacker News Reader

The Strangeness of Grief

newyorker.com

59 pointsThevet20 comments

Grief really is weird - and perhaps even weirder for humans than for other species.

Human tool use has primes us to see things that we can control not simply as things we control, but as extensions of ourselves.

Human co and counter operative behaviour has forced us to adapt reflective cognitive structures in which our minds attempt to simulate the minds of others - most accurately for those we best understand, which includes the people that we are closest to.

We use this simulation as an interface by which we can generate expectations for how people we understand will respond to different situations - and we can treat those that we trust as complex extensions of ourselves (unexpected behaviour and especially betrayal in this context invalidates our internal simulation not only of the world, but of ourselves).

And the death of a person known and trusted leaves us still with the cognitive structures forged to deal with them, an orphaned piece of the mind which can never again serve its prime function.

Ironically our inability to cope with the loss leads us to neglect the final cognizant vestiges of the dead.

Sorry about the wall of text - I haven't been sleeping, and my mind's going weird places.

Actually, it was kind of beautiful.

Thanks man.

seconded, it was well written

grief is a sonnet.

it's beauty, it's a lukewarm waterfall.

it's a warmth that washes

over us, intense.

consuming, penetrating

until we yield.

and in that silence, we let go.

grief is beautiful because it's a gentle descent, where in that abyss is a hand that lifts us; like a infant just now born, being wrapped in warm cloth, and given to its mother.

i have an intimate relationship with grief.

i see it coming again to visit, and i know it will be one of the last feelings i will experience as i arrive.

it's only "strange" because we are not as familiar with non duality as we are with duality.

grief is a chain that unbinds. it's a 10-Ton weight that makes you lighter.

i guess it's time for bed.

Having read a lot about VS Naipaul, and about his sometimes cantankerous nature, I am touched to see how attached he became to his cat.

It's always nice to be pleasantly surprised by someone.

I've noticed from personal experience that it's often easier to grieve for animals than for our own relatives.

The loss of my grandmother overwhelmed me so much that it could have passed for indifference.

The organs of grief seemed to have been seared away, like I had stared at the sun.

On the other hand I've wept over the loss of some of my pets.

Coincidentally, shortly after the loss of my grandmother, I was sick for three years with all sorts of undiagnosable problems.

It was only after I started feeling physically better that I recognized the depth of my grief. It felt like I might have followed her into the grave if I hadn't pulled out of it in time.

It seems that as emotions become more subtle and deep, is is harder to express them.

Think of the love between an old couple and a bunch of newly weds who can’t stop repeating “I love you” to each other...eventually there seems to be a point where you don’t need to say it anymore.

I’ve had a similar experience to you with the death of a loved one. The grief was so deep and overwhelming that no action (not even crying) could express it properly.

So I’ve concluded that surface emotions are easily expressed and you need a master to really express the depths (in the form of art, poetry etc.)

Grief is the point of living. Only when losing something or someone hurts you, you know their true value to yourself.

I think that's a bit morbid and misses the point. I would say grief gives life meaning and

> know their true value to yourself.

>Only when losing something or someone hurts you, you know their true value to yourself.

I strongly disagree. Self-aware, introspective people who deliberately examine what's important to themselves in a conscious effort to not take it for granted, do not need to lose it to only then know the true value of it.

I don’t know, I freak out just thinking at the depths of loss I’ll experience when my parents die. I’m aware enough by partially inspecting what they mean and do for me to have a hard time fathoming the total of that “calculation.”

Read about stoics and negative visualization then give it a shot. Live in that uncomfortable mental space of life without your parents. Not to dull their life and your time left with them, but the opposite! The stoics used negative visualization to appreciate what they had. Many people mistake the stoics for being morbid, but it should work for most people to enhance their time and ability to stay present with people they love. It is a profound and different way to live compared to how most people seem to approach mortality, but it works well for me. When they pass, there will still be grief, but you will take their passing with the sure knowledge you optimized your time with them.

“Grief and love are sisters, woven together from the beginning. Their kinship reminds us that there is no love that does not contain loss and no loss that is not a reminder of the love we carry for what we once held close.” - Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow

It has taken me a long time to internalize that grief is not a “bad” feeling, but rather just an uncomfortable one. Until I was fully willing to experience it, instead of avoid or ignore it, I was completely unable to move on. Grief is indeed strange.

Can't we argue this is true for all "bad" feelings? If they were utterly useless, why would they still exist? They have a function.

Love and grief is basically akin to "what goes up must go down". No high without the low, like the rollercoaster life is.

A few years ago I was forced to put my cat down due to a neighbors dog attacking her.

I took her to an emergency vet and spent over $3k trying to save her, but at some point it became obvious that we couldn't and so the decision was made to put her to sleep.

Throughout all of this I was upset and worried, but not overly so. In my mind, I cared about her, but it was still just a cat.

Until they put her in my arms. I remember she looked up at me and started purring and I just completely lost it. I'm not one who can cry in front of other people, but at that moment I couldn't help it.

It took months before I stopped turning around expecting her to be there. When it first happened my girlfriend made a comment about killing the dog. I know she didn't mean it, she was just angry and lashing out. She still can't look at a picture of her without crying.

Reading the description of Augustus brought it all back.

I basically don't have a relationship with that neighbor. I haven't gone into detail, but that neighbor was either malicious or dumb. I chose to believe dumb because that sort of anger does no one any good but I can't bring myself to build any sort of relationship with the man.

I miss my programming buddy.

I lost my cat in my 20ies, which died of old age. I wasn't living with my parents anymore for years when this happened. I still sometimes weep when I think about it, decades later.

My father got cancer and lived with it for about 7 years before dying. Our relationship wasn't exactly close. When he was in the last weeks, I got so used to the hospitals and health issues that everything seemed so normal to me. I knew exactly what was eventually going to happen though. It only hit me two days before he died, and it was with the brutality of an instantaneous train-wreck.

You could have told me everything, exactly as I wrote it down now, I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have made a difference.

>> There are a number of high quality teams working on next generation protocols today (Dfinity, Cosmos, Polkadot, Ethereum 2, Algorand

If any of these projects take over and crush all the other projects, I'm going to have to seriously consider quitting software development and work in marketing instead. The best thing about these projects is their marketing IMO.

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